


Close Shave

by unrivaled_tapestry



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Crimson Flower Route, Established Relationship, Facial Shaving, M/M, See notes for content warnings, Violent Intrusive Thoughts, platonic knifeplay, warning for Jeritza being Jeritza
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-06
Updated: 2020-05-06
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:21:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24031204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unrivaled_tapestry/pseuds/unrivaled_tapestry
Summary: Jeritza's not sure how it started—either the relationship, or the quiet ritual of Byleth shaving him in the forward camp. However, the longer it lasts, the less he wants it to end.
Relationships: Jeritza von Hrym/My Unit | Byleth
Comments: 22
Kudos: 145





	Close Shave

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to [InkSplatterM](https://archiveofourown.org/users/InkSplatterM/) and [GoldenThreads](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldenThreads/) who beta'd this for me!
> 
> Specific warnings for this fic include:  
> \- Jeritza being Jeritza, and having something of a fixation on death/intrusive thoughts of his death and others  
> \- shaving with a straight razor  
> \- description of sleep deprivation and insomnia

Jeritza, despite his best efforts, knew that his body was possessed of certain limitations. When true tiredness set in, possibly inspired by orders to march through the night or the most familiar spectres of his insomnia, he was not immune. He felt as though his bones would crumble, leaving the viscera of him to melt into his shredded bedroll. It didn’t always follow a battle or campaign; sometimes he merely stayed awake until he felt as though he could sleep without dreaming. When he’d risen one morning, watched the sun set, and remained awake long enough to watch the sun rise again, he often found himself unable to lift his scythe. Even the Death Knight ran into these limitations, though Jeritza at times came back to find torn muscles and something behind his eyes screaming for sleep.

When Edelgard saw this, she ordered him to rest. Those orders came as they always did, from a small mouth and guarded, unsure eyes that couldn’t know for sure who they were speaking to. He didn’t blame her—he was unpredictable.

She perhaps planned to eliminate him at some point. Though Edelgard remained his falconer, he was a raptor unlike her Eagles—wilder and more vicious than expected. She’d not tamed him, and was unwilling to release him back into the wild should that effort fail. Their arrangement kept the Death Knight in check, mostly, but Jeritza knew that if it was between him or her Professor, she would command von Vestra to try his hand at making it quick, though she had to know that any such bet risked her hawkish minister as well.

And so he rested.

On long campaigns, several days usually passed like that. Battles hatched between sparse naps and nightmares brought life back even as they made his joints ache to the point of collapse. Long rides found him nearly asleep on horseback by the end of them, wondering whether the time he’d lost had been to his co-habitator or exhaustion.

During those long days, he inevitably found a familiar sensation tinnily scraping against the jaw of his helmet, or against his blighted palm as he felt the familiar dusting of blond scruff before he could see it in his little mirror.

He hated an unshaven face, especially his own. It felt too much like a man becoming his father.

And yet when exhaustion finally claimed him, his hands felt leaden, and his dry eyes stung from the scent of the clove in his sword oil. He could sometimes only bring himself to do the things he had to do, and shaving waited for the next day. Or the next.

One such night in camp, Jeritza spied Byleth watching him.

This wasn’t unusual. Edelgard’s prized falcon kept his keen eyes on everything. Jeritza knew the sensation of having that attention fixed on him; they were green-blue and wide like the ocean. Unlike the ocean, their presence relaxed him.

“Can I help you?” 

“You don’t like to go unshaven.”

“I do not,” Jeritza drawled. “I will see to it tomorrow.”

“That’s what you said yesterday,” Byleth responded, throwing a towel into the leather satchel he kept his own grooming supplies in.

Jeritza looked up from the oiled cloth in his hand to see Byleth looking down at him.

He didn’t think this was the start of their fated duel, as he supposed neither of them felt the forward camp just after dinner was a particularly romantic place to die, so he assumed it was the other thing and did not shy away when Byleth reached his hand out to Jeritza’s jaw. His hand was freezing, as usual. Jertiza wondered if, even in the evening, woodland cold, his cheek felt hot to those corpse-cold fingers.

Byleth regarded him, the inward quirk to his brows the closest thing to a readable emotion—whether that emotion was thoughtfulness or concern, Jertiza could not tell, and Byleth wasn’t a man to make him worry at not knowing.

Byleth’s hand glanced off of Jertiza’s cheek, and in its wake Jeritza resisted the urge to reach up and grasp for the echo of that sensation. Was it the hum of the Crest of Flames, or was it the novelty of touch? Jeritza barely remembered what that was like, and Byleth was the only one who dared now, so he had nothing to compare it to.

“I can take care of that. One minute.” Byleth began fishing through his satchel again. He knew where Jertiza’s was, of course, but knew better than to fish around things that weren’t his.

“It is no trouble.” It troubled Jeritza a great deal, but the idea of Byleth shaving him stirred a different feeling, one that flushed his cheeks and had the potential to be much worse than his current discomfort. It wasn’t even what he felt when he reached for Byleth’s side, or vice versa, and more happened.

“It’s no problem,” Byleth replied. “Used to do this for the mercenaries all the time.”

“Not surprising. You are an expert, and a blade is a blade.”

A beat passed as Byleth considered his response. “You can keep holding the dagger if you want.”

After laying the blade back in its sheath and laying that sheath near the other weapons resting on his saddlebags, Jeritza folded his hands in front of him. “That is not necessary.”

Jeritza watched Byleth use a brush to stir up the suds in a beat-up wooden bowl he kept beside his campside resting place. Next, Byleth’s hands moved surely to the razor, and Jeritza nearly protested until he saw the way Byleth pinned one end of the strap to a barrel with his knee and sharpened the blade with fluid, staccato strokes. It made a sound that Jeritza felt in his whole body, reminding him of the way others described being moved by a master violinist, and when Byleth started coating Jeritza’s jaw and neck with soap, he tilted his head back. The water was still warm, if rapidly cooling in the shock from the breeze.

Byleth slid the razor across Jeritza’s throat, mercifully scraping away the parts Jeritza hated, before messily dunking it in warm water and soap. Steel glided over his jugular, his carotid, and the cartilaginous structure of his trachea before treading skin over his chin. Jeritza knew them all well, knew exactly how long it would take for him to die if Byleth decided to flick that sharpened blade the wrong direction. There was a chance Jeritza would be able to make it to the vulneraries in his supplies, but he doubted it. So he waited.

Jeritza did not die.

Instead, quick work was made of his stubble, and Byleth expertly cleaned him off with a soft linen cloth.

“How does that feel?”

“Better.” Jeritza ran the tips of his fingers over the smooth, sore flesh inflaming at the corners of his mouth. Thank you was what people usually said.

Byleth nodded, and retreated to his sleeping blanket less than a stone’s throw from Jeritza’s own.

Jeritza fell into his own bedroll, and he drifted off to the sting of his pillow against his smoothed skin.

He supposed it was a little thing.

Except for how often he revisited it until Byleth offered once more.

Jeritza wasn’t trying to go without shaving again. The sensation of stubble grating against his skin or anyone else’s, even for a moment, maddened him. But the war marched on, the Death Knight with it. A couple weeks passed before it happened again. Jeritza nearly refused, except he didn’t.

Sometimes Byleth was tired too. He’d shift in front of Jeritza until their knees bumped together, and he’d spread his thighs around Jeritza’s as he positioned himself in Jeritza’s lap. It made Jeritza think about trying things the other way, except he didn’t feel the urge to rut up. The lump of flesh under his belt stayed soft even as the blade grew cold against his skin. Jeritza would have understood it if it was that, if his cock twitched every time he put his life in Byleth’s hands. That made sense.

He imagined Byleth got some reassurance out of having a solid ten or fifteen minutes a day to dispatch Jeritza with little fuss, should he ever want to. The idea calmed Jeritza too—it would be the easiest solution, for sure, for someone who promised to bring death.

Byleth finished up with a few final flicks of his razor just under Jeritza’s nose, carefully holding him while running a wet cloth around the bony spot at the base of his ear. If he hesitated a moment longer than needed to pull his hand away, Jeritza wouldn’t ask him about it. He had another burning question, one much more in need of an answer. 

“It must be nice,” Jeritza said, tentatively. “Me at your mercy. It is...convenient.”

There was a pause, Byleth snapping the water out of the cloth as he hung it up to dry.

“ _That’s_ what this is about to you?” There was no accusation behind the words; not the one most people had, no suspicion ringed with an inference of shame. There was maybe a little surprise bursting through the placid surface of Byleth’s voice, like an old fish swirling in a pond.

“Isn’t it?” Jeritza’s question felt high, innocent even, to his own ears.

Another pause. “It hadn’t occurred to me.”

Jeritza had no way to know if Byleth was lying or not.

“If you think I’m planning to kill you, why let me do it?” Byleth coiled up the strap and folded his razor.

All Jeritza had to offer was a shrug—something that disguised the _days_ that followed Byleth shaving him and the revisiting it. How he had come to look forward to it. He hoped his expression successfully masked the thrill that started to form down his spine when Byleth started sharpening the blade, straddling him, or at the mere whisper of a mailed hand slipping behind Jeritza’s neck to hold him still.

“We could try blunted blades sometime,” Byleth said. “In bed. If you’d like.”

Jeritza pondered that for a long minute. The prospect of being fucked with a knife at his throat was tempting, perhaps, but— “You give too much credit to my imagination.”

“Hm. No excitement if it isn’t sharp?”

Not wanting to disgrace himself with his response, Jeritza said nothing.

“I guess we shouldn’t, then.” Byleth sat back, poking at the embers of their fire. In the distance, the rest of the camp began to settle. The Eagles went into their disparate tents, and the light went out behind the larger canvas where the Emperor slept. “You don’t have to tell me.”

“I would tell you, but I do not know,” Jeritza admitted. “I would like you to keep doing it, so long as that is amenable to you.”

Byleth nodded, a wordless sign that he had no issues with that arrangement.

“You never answered my question,” Jeritza said, sitting up in his bedroll.

“Hm?”

“Why do you do this for me? It is not an insignificant amount of work, and you are often as tired as I am.”

Byleth doused the last of the fire, hot smoke and steam hissing up into the air as the last embers finally found rest as charred shards of wood. “Maybe I like taking care of you.”

Jeritza laid his head down on his pillow, and a curious itch started in his bones. He couldn’t remember the last person who took care of him. There had been valets, before crime and condemnation. Mercedes was perhaps the last. Although they had been reunited, he adamantly refused, did not even wish for her to be in the same space with him for fear of the Death Knight.

If he lingered too much, it was possible he’d lose another night of sleep to the feeling in his gut or the rats that gnawed on the inside of his skull, always threatening to show him things that he didn’t remember. So instead he cast his eyes over to Byleth’s sleeping form. His back was to Jeritza, which would seem like a mistake if it wasn’t a show of quiet confidence. In what, Jeritza wasn’t sure.

Instead he turned his mind to the way it felt when Byleth delicately tilted his chin up to inspect his handiwork. How he’d move Jeritza into position and how good it felt to let him. It was unusual, to know that the entire time Byleth had been bringing gentleness, instead of constrained violence.

Jeritza curled around that thought as he closed his eyes.


End file.
